Whats wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Under a longstanding principle of copyright law, consumers are allowed to make “fair use” of a copyrighted work. This exception protected legitimate uses of copyrighted works such as parody, criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching and research. The DMCA, however, limited the fair use exception by prohibiting the circumvention of content-control technologies even when that circumvention is done for legitimate purposes, such as criticism or research. The ACLU believes that since Ben’s purpose is legitimate research and criticism rather than piracy, his planned research project (copying N2H2’s copyrighted program to reverse engineer it and obtain and publish the copyrighted block list) is fair use and protected by the Constitution.
